Gnawing the highway’ s edges, its black mouth
Hums quietly: ‘Home, come home …’
Behind its viscous breath the very word ‘growth’
Grows fungi, rot;
White mottling its root.
More dreaded
Than canebreak, quarry ,or sun – shocked gully – bed
Its horrors held Hemingway’s hero rooted
To sure, clear shallows.
It begins nothing. Limbo of cracker convicts, Negroes
Its black mood
Each sunset takes a smear of your life’s blood.
Fearful, original sinuosities! Each mangroves sapling
serpentlike, its root obscene
As a six – fingered hand,
Conceal within its clutch the mossbacked toad,
toadstools, the potent ginger – Lily,
Petals of blood,
The speckled vulva of the tiger – orchid;
Outlandish phalloi
Haunting the travellers of its one road.
Deep, deeper than sleep
Like death,
Too rich in it’s decrescence, too close of breath,
In the fast – filling night, note
How the last bird drinks darkness with its throat
How the wild saplings slip
Backward to darkness, go black
With widening amnesia ,take the edge
Of nothing to them slowly, merge
Limb,tongue and sinew into a knot
Like Chaos, like the road
Ahead.